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| Publisher |
DC Vertigo |
| Writer |
Neil Gaiman |
| Cover Artist |
Dave McKean |
| Artist |
Mark Buckingham |
| Published | March 1993 |
It's London in June. Mad Hettie sits on a junked sofa beneath an underpass. She is approached by three tough-looking young women carrying a box with holes. They tell Mad Hettie that they got it, and she asks what took them so long. One of them replies that it was because there are no doves in London; they finally found a cage of them behind a pub and gave it the rum raisins to get it drunk like Mad Hettie asked. The old woman gives them their five quid that they had been promised, but the women become angered because they had spent all day looking for the dove. Mad Hettie sticks to the terms of their deal, and refuses to give them anymore money. One of the women pulls a knife, and says she figures that if Mad Hettie has five quid; maybe she actually has even more money. The decrepit old woman tells the tough that she had better put the knife away, but the women scoff and ask Hettie what she's gonna do. Mad Hettie replies that the first thing she'd do is to pick up a twig, and does so. She then breaks the twig, and one of the women falls down; her leg broken. One of the women runs away, and Mad Hettie takes her money back. The woman with the broken leg picks up her knife and tries to attack Hettie from behind. She misses and calls Mad Hettie a witch. Mad Hettie walks away saying that she's not a witch, but she didn't get to be 250 years old without learning a few tricks. Later, Mad Hettie is on the roof a tall building. She sacrifices the dove and reads it's entrails. The entrails reveal to Hettie that someone is coming back, and Mad Hettie vows that she's not going to miss her this time.It's a month later and in America. Sexton Furnival is sixteen years old and suffering from a terminal case of ennui. He's typing a suicide note on his computer; decrying that there's no point to anything... and according to Sexton, "if there's no point to anything you might as well be dead." He explains that he doesn't blame his parents, even though they haven't been spectacularly good...